St. Croix Crossing users: Have you been hitting red lights on Minnesota 36 in Oak Park Heights? How many signal changes do you have to sit through if you’re trying to go north on Osgood Avenue during rush hour?

Now that the bridge has been open a week, the Minnesota Department of Transportation wants to hear how it’s going.

MnDOT, which began tweaking signal timing when the new St. Croix River bridge opened and the Stillwater Lift Bridge closed Aug. 2, will continue to monitor and make adjustments as necessary while traffic stabilizes over the next few weeks.

In Oak Park Heights, some motorists have complained about not having enough time to cross Minnesota 36 at Osgood, Oakgreen and Washington avenues, said Police Chief Brian DeRosier. “They’re not allowing the cross traffic sufficient time to go across,” he said. “They are timed to go rather quickly.”

However, no major accidents have been reported, DeRosier said.

The Minnesota 36 signals from Lake Elmo Avenue to Osgood are coordinated on four timing plans, depending on the time of day, said Kevin Schwartz, whose title at MnDOT is “signal optimization engineer.”

After the bridge opened, MnDOT “made some adjustments to try to help the main-line progression as best as possible,” he said. “The goal is to have as good a two-way progression as we can for both eastbound and westbound traffic. You have to keep in mind that it’s a balance between the main line and the cross streets, and that if we want to give more time to the main line, we’d have to increase the delay for the cross street.”

Mary Divine is a reporter for the St. Paul Pioneer Press. She covers Washington County and the St. Croix River Valley, but has also spent time covering the state Capitol. She has won numerous journalism awards, including the Premack Award and the Minnesota Society of Professional Journalists' Page One Award. Prior to joining the Pioneer Press in 1998, she worked for the Rochester, Minn., Post-Bulletin and at the St. Joseph, Mo., News-Press. Her work has also appeared in a number of magazines, including Mpls/St.Paul Magazine, Twin Cities Business Monthly and Minnesota Magazine. She is a graduate of Carleton College and lives in St. Paul with her husband, Greg Myers, and their three children, Henry, 16, Frances, 14, and Fred, 11.

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